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Committee on Degrees in History and Literature Faculty of Arts and Sciences Harvard University
Cover photo credit: Harvard News Office, Copyright 2008, President and Fellows of Harvard College Written by Andrew J. Romig, Copyright 2008
Table of Contents
Introduction: The History and Literature Senior Thesis. ................................................................................. 1
Rules of the game. ...............................................................................2 Whats inside.......................................................................................3 Acknowledgments...............................................................................3
Insert: Your Relationship With Your Advisor. .......................... 4 Chapter One: Developing the Project...................................... 6
Organizing your time..........................................................................6 From topics to the basic building blocks of research. ..........................7 Storming the brain. ..............................................................................8 Brainstorming exercises. .......................................................................8 Supplementing your brainstorms: pre-research. ..................................9 Chapter One recap............................................................................10
Appendix E: Recent Theses in History and Literature..........51 Insert: Good Habits to Develop Early/Bad Habits To Break Right Away................................................................... 56
introduction
We recommend that you read this handbook first from cover to cover, ideally all in one sitting. It is written with this reading strategy in mind. Then, once you are familiar with its contents, you can refer back to it again (and again) along the way. Always keep in mind that if, as you read along, one of the suggestions doesnt sound useful to you, its completely within your right not to follow it! (Thats right. Its okay.) However, we strongly encourage you to follow the sage advice contained within these pages. Why? Because, quite simply, it works. So, okay. Its time to take the plunge and read about the road ahead. Find a nice, quiet place. Sit back, relax, get comfortable. Are you too warm? Too cold? Fix that right away. Hungry? Thirsty, maybe? Grab a frosty beverage or a tasty snack. You dont want anything to distract you from the next hour or two. Enjoy!
Thats it.Those are the rules.The rest of what follows is, once again, a series of guidelines and suggestions and general musings only, designed to help you to direct your energies and to clarify your thinking and your writing.
Whats Inside
Before moving on, lets take a quick look at whats under the hood. Chapter 1, Developing the Project, talks about how to develop your interests into a thesis project.Youll learn strategies for exploring and articulating what fascinates you about your History and Literature field. And then youll learn about how to move efficiently from thinking about your project in terms of topic, which is too broad to define your thesis, toward thinking in terms of the basic building blocks of an extended research project: primary sources and questions. Chapter 2, Writing the Proposal, helps you to organize your raw materials from the project development stage and then decide upon the best possible research question to guide your thesis work. Your research question will be the key element of your History and Literature senior thesis proposal. In this chapter we talk about what the proposal is.We talk about what it isnt. And we give you a few strategies for how you might approach it. Chapter 3, Researching and Writing the Rough Draft, lets you read more about, you guessed it, conducting your research and writing the rough draft of your thesis. Well talk about how to stay active as you engage your source material and search for answers to your research question. Well explain how to break down the writing of the rough draft into manageable pieces. And well suggest some techniques designed to help you to keep your thoughts flowing from that brain of yours onto the page, where they can be seen and shared. Chapter 4, Revising, the Final Frontier, teaches you about the skill (and it is a skill, which you can develop and improve through practice) of revising your work. Here you will learn about the place where your thesis, like Frankensteins monster at the flash of the lightning strike, will truly come alive. Chapter 5, Finishing the Job, is really just a brief guide to the end of the project, containing a few words on proofreading, formatting, and matters such as the kind of paper you should use, where to buy thesis binders, etc. The Appendices at the end of the handbook contain basic advice about funding your research, some sample documents, a listing of helpful research and writing tools that you can find on the web, information about some of the research methods that tend to be more specifically tied to the History and Literature senior thesis, and other goodies.
Acknowledgments
A Gordon Gray Faculty Grant for Writing Pedagogy funded the completion of this guide. History and Literature would like to thank Jim Herron and the Expository Writing Program at Harvard for overseeing and facilitating the process. Thanks also go to Sigrid Cordell Anderson for commenting helpfully on early chapter drafts, and to the students of History and Literature classes 07, 08, and 09, who provided helpful thoughts and wish lists for thesis guide content. This handbook began under the direction of Kimberly Davis, who initially spearheaded the project. Jeanne Follansbee Quinn, Stephanie Lin, and Amy Spellacy commented and contributed during the drafting. And finally, future History and Literature seniors owe a great debt of gratitude to Iliana Montauk 06. It was she who came to us originally with the idea for a senior thesis guide, and it was her enthusiastic leadership that helped initially to lift the project off the ground.
A Guide to Writing a Thesis in History and Literature | page 3
Your tutor will not, however, do your work for you. That is, your tutor will help you find the right direction, but dont expect your tutor to give you all the answers. Definitely dont expect your tutor to dictate to you your research question or provide you with the structure for your research and writing. Your tutors job is to help you to write the best thesis that you are able to write. Nothing more, nothing less. Remember that Hist and Lit tutors will be more than generous with their time, but they cant be there for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In your very first meeting with your tutor, be sure to have a frank conversation about your respective schedules. Talk about the communication method (email? phone? carrier pigeon?) and the hours of the day that are best. Talk about what you and your tutor expect for response times to emails. Some people check email often; others not so often. Either is okay. Its simply important that you and your tutor agree on what to expect from one another. How can I help my tutor to help me? Communicating what you want and need most to your tutor is actually sometimes more difficult than it sounds, but its crucial for a successful tutor-student relationship. One way to begin this process is to think carefully about your experiences in the past and especially about the comments that youve received on your papers during your time at Harvard. Look for patterns. Do you have trouble organizing your arguments? Tell your tutor. Do you have trouble organizing your time? Swallow your pride and tell your tutor. Are you a strong close reader, but maybe you have trouble connecting those readings to larger issues? Tell your tutor. Or maybe you tend to think big and your tutors and professors have always told you that you need to do a better job of grounding your arguments in more evidence? Thats right: tell your tutor. Remember most of all that your tutor cant help you if you dont tell her or him whats on your mind, and your tutor certainly cant help you if he or she doesnt know that there is an issue that needs attention. The absolute worst that you can do, therefore, is clam up and not seek help from your tutor when you need it. It is unfortunately a very common impulse among students, so avoid it if you have it. Always keep in close communication with your tutor, especially if you ever
feel stuck. Whatever you do, dont ever go AWOL, either physically or mentally, even if your first instinct is to try to hole up and just get it done (whatever it happens to be at that stage of the game). It can only hurt you. Im thinking about working with a professor as my thesis advisor. How do I make this happen, and what are the pros and cons? The best match for a thesis advisor is someone who is interested in your topic and who will be an effective critic and editor, even if she or he is not an expert on your topic. Be sure to choose someone with whom you are likely to be comfortable working on a week to week basis to whom you would feel comfortable turning not only when things are going well, but also if you run into trouble with your work. This is perhaps the most important element of a advisor-student relationship, more important than specific expertise. Keep in mind that you can always consult about bibliography with experts in your field even if they are not your assigned advisor. You may not choose for your advisor a Teaching Fellow or Lecturer who is not affiliated with History and Literature, or a professor from a faculty outside of Harvard. But if you believe that a member of the Committee on Degrees or another member of the Harvard faculty would be your best advisor, go to that faculty member and present your thesis ideas as clearly as you can. Ask her or him whether she or he would be willing and available to advise your thesis. If you do choose to work with a faculty member, and that faculty member is not on the Committee on Degrees, we will provide a concentration advisor who will keep you in touch with Hist and Lit requirements and who will help you to prepare for your oral examination. Note that it will be your responsibility to negotiate the specific role that your concentration advisor will play in your thesis work itself.
chapter one
page 6 | Chapter One: Developing the Project
Runners, to your marks . . . Its a clich, and youll hear it from your tutors and professors more than once if you havent heard it already, but the senior thesis is a marathon, not a sprint. If you have had the typical college experience thus far, practically every other assignment that you have completed as part of your coursework has been a sprint. Its been an essay on which you spend a few weeks at the very most (and usually much less time than that) to conceive and to complete. In a sprint, it is possible to expend all of your energy in one burst and still reach the finish line.You might collapse in a heap of sweat and exhaustion at the end, but you can still make it. A senior thesis cannot be a sprint. If you try to complete it in one single burst of energy, you will collapse in that heap of sweat and exhaustion long before the finish is even in sight.You wont make it. For the senior thesis, you have to complete the project one step at a time.You must methodically pace yourself so that you have enough in the tank throughout the course of the race to make it to the end. Think of project development as your training for the marathon to come. Youve done a great portion of this training already. You have learned, that is, in your classes and your sophomore and junior tutorials, how to ask analytical questions and how to conduct research.Youve learned how to write a formal essay in which you introduce an argument, defend that argument with evidence, and conclude that argument by explaining its wider significance. In project development, the idea is to generate the raw materials of an extended research project as many of them as you possibly can in a methodical and efficient manner. Its important to take your time, to cast your net widely, and to keep an open mind. You want to make sure not to make final decisions about what your project will look like too hastily.You will, of course, eventually have to make some hard choices and stick with them, so prepare yourself for that. But that comes later. During the project development stage, you must allow yourself to dream a little.
On a week to week basis, we recommend that you spend as much time on your thesis work as you would for a normal class. If you think about school as a 40 hour work week, and if you are taking a regular load of four classes, this means that you should probably devote about 10 hours of your time each week to HL99. We all know, of course, that it is a rare Harvard student who works only a 40 hour week. College life tends to expand hours.We also realize that some weeks have more time in them for thesis work than others. But if you plan to spend, on average, about 10 solid hours per week on your thesis work, you will make steady progress from start to finish. Its also important to remember that your senior thesis is only one aspect of your life, not your entire life.The best theses are almost always not the ones that are all-consuming in a given students life. Shutting yourself out from the rest of the world to the neglect of everything else will not help you to be more serious. It actually will cause you to lose perspective, which does not make for good analytical thinking and writing. Keep your perspective. Stay integrated with the rest of your life.
How you go about searching for and finding these components is, of course, completely up to you. But find them you must. There is no option there. Its perfectly natural to begin a project by describing its topic. Maybe youre thinking of writing about protest songs in the 60s. Maybe its the medieval papacy. Perhaps eighteenth century Paris has always tripped your trigger. These are all great general topics. Its important to know, however, that a topic is far too broad to define your research project.Why? Because a topic alone doesnt in and of itself lead to a compelling scholarly argument. For that, you need to move from thinking about topic toward thinking about the primary sources that you will use and the questions (ideally one single question) that you will be asking. Interests, primary sources, questions. Eventually, you will narrow your project down by picking the best in each of these categories (more about that in Chapter Two). But for now, in the project development stage, you want to generate as many interests, primary sources, and questions as you can. These are the basic building blocks of any research project, and the only blocks with which you should be playing at this stage of the game.
Brainstorming Exercises
Exercise A (20-30 minutes): Brainstorm topics of interest. In the first brainstorm, your job is to write down all of the possible topics that you might be interested in researching further with your thesis. Here is where you list all of the themes, people, places, texts, events, movements, images, etc., that you might possibly want to study in detail. Nothing is off limits here. This is your chance to think big, so you can, if you like, indulge your grandest aspirations. The only criterion is that whatever you write down must capture your imagination and make you want to know more.What have you come across in the past years that has fascinated you? What has surprised you? What authors and genres and events and people keep you coming back for more? Just write down whatever comes to your head.You will have plenty of time to revise later. Want to study poverty? Write it down. Love? Fine. Put it on there. Do you like seventeenth century art? Write that down, too. Interested in Shakespeare? T.S. Eliot? World War II? Women? Men? Frontier dentistry? Just write anything down that comes to mind that you might consider to be a topic of possible research interest to you. As you can probably guess, the purpose of this list is simply to help you locate the general areas where you might conduct further research. Think of these as the rough locations on your treasure map where you might start digging for your specific research question later.
Exercise B (20-30 minutes): Brainstorm primary sources. In the second brainstorm, your job is to take that first list of general topics of interest and then, for each item, write down all of the possible primary sources that you have come across in the past that you might use to study those general topics. There are a few items to think about with this second exercise. First, you will notice that in this brainstorm you will generate a very different type of list than in the first. You will generate, that is, a list of specific titles The Tempest could be on this list, but Shakespeare could not; the WPA slave narrative records would work quite well, but slavery or oral histories would not. (Its perfectly okay, by the way, if you cant remember a name or title completely. As long as you are referring to a specific source, just jot it down to the best of your memory: e.g., that cool poem about pirates is perfect.) Second, remember that primary sources dont necessarily need to be written records. They can be photos, songs, paintings, buildings, maps virtually anything that you can analyze. Third, note that you may not be able to come up with any primary sources for some, perhaps several of the more general topics from the first brainstorming exercise. That tells you something important about where you might conduct some supplemental, preliminary research later on. For now, just take brief note of these topics and move on to the next exercise when youre ready. Exercise C (20-30 minutes): Brainstorm questions. For the last brainstorming exercise, your job is to take stock of both lists that you generated earlier and then to start asking some questions about the items on those lists. Dont be critical at this point. As with the first list, here, the sky is the limit. Just write the questions that come to mind any questions, all questions. How did industrialization influence Russian poetry at the turn of the century? Why did Graham Greene write The Quiet American? Dont worry yet about whether they are good questions (there will be plenty of time for that later). Just be sure to ask as many questions as you possibly can. Ask questions not just of your topics of interest, but of the primary sources that you listed as well.You will be tempted to ask whether there are other primary sources that you dont know.Thats an important question, so write it down. But try also to ask questions of the primary sources that you do know. Questions, questions, and more questions. You can never ask too many questions during project development. And the more you ask, the more you will know that you are on the right track toward developing a strong thesis.
Remember what a primary source is? Primary sources are the documents and data that we analyze in our work. In History and Literature these are the texts (and remember that texts are not just written) that we analyze and discuss. Secondary sources comment on and/ or analyze primary sources.
This supplementary work of conducting pre-research in order to fill out your brainstorming lists is the last crucial part of the project development stage. Its also extremely fun, because your job is simply to explore. Go to the library and search the catalogs. Read, but also talk to human beings.You can find the contact information for the Widener Library research librarian assigned to students in History and Literature in Appendix B of this handbook. Make an appointment and go ask some questions. This may require some courage, but it will pay great dividends if you do it. Go and talk to members of the tutorial board and Harvard faculty who teach in your field. Youll be amazed at how much you can learn just from sending an email or two and setting up a few short meetings. Our main recommendation about pre-research is that you only do it after youve brainstormed interests, primary sources, and questions each at least once all by yourself. The purpose of brainstorming, after all, is to free up your brain and to allow it to speak to you without prompting. Your goal is quite literally to tap into the recesses of your unconscious to learn what truly fascinates you and what you really think. If you conduct pre-research first, you cant be sure that your ideas especially your ideas about what interests you are your own and not from others. Keep in mind, finally, that going out and exploring in order to develop your brainstorm lists is certainly research and a critical part of the senior thesis process, but it is not yet your research project per se. It is still project development.You can think of it, if you like, as collecting the necessary ingredients and stocking the kitchen for a delicious meal that you will cook later. You will take some of those ingredients and mix them carefully and in the proper measure in order to create the research project itself.
chapter two
realistically draw? Do you have to go somewhere else to get it? Will it be available to you when you go? Does it cost money? You have to think about the actual contents of your source material and whether that material could actually answer the question that you ask: How likely is it that the source material will actually be able to answer my question? Does the source material contain enough data/evidence to make an argument? And then, you need to realize that while six months may seem like a lot of time right now, in research terms it can be lightning quick. You therefore must think about the time that you have to conduct your research: Can you possibly read and digest your source material in the time that you have to complete this project? Is it truly possible to conduct all of your research in the time that you have? If its a potentially enormous source base, can you logically narrow it down to a more manageable size?
The most frequent and most dangerous pitfall that students run into in their senior thesis projects is the pitfall that comes from starting their project with an unanswerable research question.
Where to be Flexible, Where Not to be Flexible, and Is There Any Give in the System?
Now, you might be thinking, The proposal is due only a few weeks into the semester, so what if Im still not entirely sure of what Im doing when I submit my proposal? What if I change my mind?These are perfectly logical questions to be asking at this point, but our response is that you shouldnt worry. Might your research question change over time? Yes. Its possible, even probable, that your research question will evolve as you move further down the path. You will make adjustments to it (usually you will narrow it even further) based on what you find as part of your research. This is perfectly normal. But ideally, your research question will remain fairly constant throughout the course of your project. If you put in the time now, before and while you write the proposal, you are more likely to find a research question with which you can stick for the duration of the project. If you follow the advice in this chapter, you will be able find such a question. So, in an ideal world, your research question should most likely NOT change dramatically after the proposal. Thats why taking the time for the project development stage is so important. It does happen, however, that students will have their proposals accepted by the tutorial board and yet still find it necessary, later in the game, to change their project in a dramatic way. If at any time in the project you think this might be necessary, you should talk to your tutor immediately! 99 times out of 100, your tutor will be able to help you to right the ship and continue along your way. But if you and your tutor agree that a change is in order, you simply need to talk to the Director of Studies about it and come up with a new plan.
If you are asked to rewrite and resubmit your proposal, it is not punishment; it is simply to help you to develop your project further and to find a strong, workable research question.
chapter three
The main reason that students grow passive when researching is that they lose sight of the question that they are asking. Without the question in mind, its impossible to know what, exactly, might be important in the sources. As a result, students either try to note everything down or (more common) they note nothing at all. To avoid this time-andenergy-wasting passivity, recite your research question like a mantra in your head. Write it on a note card or a post-it and attach it to your computer.Write it on the back of your hand if you must. Just do whatever you can to keep it at the forefront of your mind. If you do that, you will always be active as you research.
note cards, or computer note-taking and database software, its important that you find a note-taking technique that consistently works for you and that ultimately allows you to record your data and ideas in a usable form. You will also need to find a good routine for your research sessions in which you both read and write. For each session, be sure to allot enough uninterrupted time (an hour is fine; two to four hours are usually best). Then plan to spend about 80% of your session time reading and annotating (i.e. noting information with page numbers, highlighting, jotting down thoughts in a notebook or on a computer or in margins or on post-its whatever helps you to record your data in usable form). After this, we suggest that you spend the last 20% of each session actually writing paragraphs or pages. The trick and this trick works wonders is to spend this last 20% of your time writing in complete sentences. Forcing yourself to write in complete sentences each and every time you research will help you to formulate your ideas coherently and completely. Students grow comfortable writing in short-hand when they take notes, and the effect is that their thoughts are never allowed to take full form. If you spend some time writing every time you research, youll be amazed at how quickly youll amass page after page of written work work that you can then directly transfer to your rough draft. Record data and jot down thoughts and ideas for an hour or two or three or four, write some sentences, and youre done for the day. Research really can be as simple as that. Here is a series of exercises that we suggest for your complete-sentence writing sessions at the end of a days research:
Briefly summarize. Summary is not always the most useful tool to the researcher because it does not require analytical thinking. So be careful not to overdo it. However, writing out a brief summary (three or four sentences usually does the trick) of a text or a passage in your own words can sometimes help you to see elements that you may miss the first time through. It can also be useful later as you compile your rough draft when you need to give a short synopsis for your reader. Again, its important to write out these summaries in your own words. It will force you to see things through your own eyes and not through the eyes of others. Work out possible arguments in answer to your research question. For every piece of primary or secondary source evidence, write out in paragraph form what that source tells you in light of your research question. This is not the same as a summary. Instead, youre putting the content of your source material to analytical use and writing out how it could help you to answer your research question. You will find sometimes that the source material on which you worked that day helps you to answer your research question very little, or even not at all. If this is the case, try to write about why it does not help you, and then also try to write about the kinds of questions that your source could help you answer. Remember that if a source does not answer your research question, its not necessarily useless. It might (by not answering your question) actually help you to sharpen your research question by showing you what is not relevant. Put the source in dialogue with the rest of your source material. Last, try to write some sentences in which you answer for yourself how the material relates to other source material that you have consulted. Does it contradict? Does it support? Does it suggest a pattern? Or does it seem inconsistent with what youve already learned? If it is a secondary source that makes an argument, do you agree or disagree? Why?
If you find that your evidence is not speaking as directly to your research question as you would hope, talk to your tutor immediately! This can be a sign that you may need to modify your question and/or primary source base slightly.
Keep in mind that in these short writing exercises, the only wrong way to do them is not to write in complete sentences. Otherwise, the sky is the limit.What you write is all your own its simply a means for you to put your thoughts on paper in usable form. Realize also that these exercises do not have to take a great deal of time. Do yourself a favor and keep it simple. Answer the simple questions that we suggest and rattle off a paragraph or two in 15 or 30 minutes. If you're inspired to write more, terrific; but if not, you're done for the day!
Back up your work after each work session. Senior surveys from 20062008 reported that almost 10% experienced computer failure at some point during their thesis work. Don't be a victim of bad luck!
A presentation of how your evidence supports your argument. This is the largest part of your rough draft, where you write out how the evidence that you are gathering in your research leads you to your argument. Here is where you will translate the provisional structure for your rough draft into chapters of your draft. For each draft chapter you will write out, in as systematic a manner as possible, how a given portion of your research data answers your research question. This part of your rough draft will feel clunky. Parts of it might feel bloated. Others will feel incomplete. Pieces will be disconnected, disjointed, and disordered. Some sections might even feel a bit wrong. Thats all okay. The goal here is to lay out your evidence for yourself and yourself alone, to describe what it says and how it supports your argument. Thats it. A basic statement about the implications of your argument. This is a component of the rough draft that students often skip, but its the most important part! This is where you start to write out your thoughts about the broader implications of your answer to your research question. Its where you return full circle to the information that you provided in the introduction of your argument. Write out how your argument allows you to understand your primary sources in a new way. Write out how your argument allows you to contribute productively to the scholarly debate about your subject. And write about how your argument leads to new questions and new ideas.
Remember that theres nothing really at stake in the rough draft. Its just a narrative of your notes a gathering place for your ideas, loosely structured in essay form. You will notice that nowhere have we even remotely suggested that youre writing Your Thesis in this stage. You are writing Cro-Magnon Thesis its early, distant evolutionary cousin. Once youve finished the rough laying out of your ideas and evidence, then (and only then) you will use the rough draft as the final tool that you will need to put together the final product. Again, regular communication with your tutor will be vitally important as you compile your rough draft. Remember that you cant expect your tutor to do your research or to answer your question for you (why would you want that anyway?). But in your weekly conversations with your tutor you should slowly but surely start to consolidate what you are finding in your primary source materials and begin to narrate those findings on the page. Bounce your ideas off of your tutor. Tell her or him what your hypotheses are and about the evidence that leads you to those hunches.Your tutor will help you to know whether your evidence actually supports what you are saying and will help you to develop those ideas and hypotheses into strong arguments.
The idea is to picture someone who is a receptive, warm, and completely nonjudgmental force in your life. This might be your roommate, your best friend from childhood, your brother, your sister, your rabbi, your pastor, your grandmother, your crazy uncle. It ultimately doesnt matter whom you picture as your audience, but it should be a real person whom you know personally, and it should be a person who doesnt necessarily know a whole lot about your topic and ideas. Writing to this person will help you to explain your ideas clearly, carefully, and confidently.
Both kinds of plagiarism, intentional and unintentional, result in the same penalty they are equal crimes in the eyes of the law and the Harvard AdBoard.
You must never allow accidental plagiarism to happen to you. You must cite every word and every idea in your rough draft that is not your own.The way to do this is to be vigilant and methodical about exactly writing down where your information is coming from as you take notes. If you quote verbatim, do so self-consciously and explicitly; use clear quotation marks and write down the author, title, and page number of the source. If you are working in translation, you must cite the name of the translator. And then, as you write your rough draft, you should try to write out citations that are as complete as possible. This is sometimes frustrating because citing sources takes time. But any time that you devote to citation now is time that you wont have to spend later. And it will help you to eliminate any chances for accidental plagiarism. Keep in mind that watching out for plagiarism is also a very good way to gauge how analytical your writing is. If you find yourself simply retelling what other people have written, its likely that youre not being analytical enough in your thinking. This is a good time to seek help from your tutor about how to approach your issue from a stronger critical angle. In citing sources, Hist and Lit allows students to use either University of Chicago or MLA (Modern Language Association) citation style. The former is preferred by most history journals.The latter is the chosen style of most literature journals. Neither citation style is better than the other, but most writers have a clear preference for which one they like to use.The only two rules are that you must use one of these citation styles, and that you must ONLY use one of these styles.You cannot mix and match. See Appendix B for further details about citation style manuals and about bibliography programs such as RefWorks and Endnote.
It is entirely likely that you wont be finished putting together your entire rough draft when you have to hand in your work in progress. This is perfectly normal, and perfectly fine. Your goal should be to take one of your provisional chapters and develop it into a self-contained essay. You must make an analytical argument in your work in progress, defend that argument with primary source evidence, and situate that argument in dialogue with some secondary scholarship, so an introduction to your thesis will probably not work for this assignment. But remember that this draft chapter does not need to contain the main argument of your thesis as a whole. In fact, it should not, because your main thesis argument should require more than 1215 pages to make persuasively! Talk to your tutor in early November about what you might submit for your draft chapter. The concentration will evaluate your submission and determine whether you have progressed far enough in your thesis work. If your draft chapter reveals that you might be struggling with your thesis work, you may be asked to meet with a member of the Hist and Lit administrative team, and perhaps to resubmit work before the winter break. Should this happen to you, just as in the proposal review process, you should not be embarrassed.The purpose of submitting your work in progress for review is simply to make sure that you are on track. If youre not on track, you want to know about it and plan how to fix the problem in December rather than in February!
In your work in progress for concentration review, you must make an analytical argument, defend that argument with primary source evidence, and situate that argument in dialogue with some secondary scholarship.
chapter four
Developing a Productive Critical Eye: Thinking in Relative Terms About Precision, Clarity, and Persuasiveness
The revising stage is all about developing a productive critical eye and using it to improve your work. The important word here is productive. Writers typically tend toward one of two critical thinking extremes: they are either not critical enough about their work, or they are too critical of their work. You know which type of self-critic you are. Either you write and everything looks brilliant to you, or you write and slowly but surely determine that nothing you say is good enough. The former leads to sloppy writing; the latter leads to writers block. Both are deadly enemies of thesis progress.Your goal is to reach a perfect happy medium between the two extremes.You want to be sufficiently critical of your work so that it is always improving. You want not to be too critical of your work so that it is always progressing.
As you work to develop a productive critical eye (and it takes work and practice!), a good trick is to think only about precision, clarity, and persuasiveness as your critical categories. Eliminate all other criteria from your vocabulary. Another trick is to realize that the primary reason that writers become unproductively (be it hypo- or hyper-) critical of their work is that they critique it according to absolute, rather than relative categories. Absolutes good, bad, right, wrong are rarely, if ever, useful categories of critical analysis.The reason is that good and bad, smart and not smart, cant mean anything on their own. No scholarship is inherently good or inherently bad.There is only scholarship that is better and worse than other scholarship: what actually exists are relative, rather than absolute, qualities. Try to work, therefore, in relative terms. Your goal in revising is to make your work more precise, to render it more clear, and more persuasive than it was before. As you write and rewrite your ideas, you are continually transforming your work from a less precise, less clear, and less persuasive state toward a more precise, more clear, and more persuasive state. Thats all revising is, really. If you focus your critical eye on these three relative categories and forget about everything else (truly, just these three and nothing more!), you will always be productively critical of your work. Your writing will improve every time you work on it. And best of all, you will never get in your own way and hinder your own progress.
Being a productive self-critic requires thinking in relative, rather than absolute terms as you assess the quality of your work.
your argument? Are you talking about all of Walt Whitmans poetry? Or just a specific book, or even just a specific poem?
Finding the Best Structure for Your Ideas: Tell a Good Story
Once you have started running your thesis statement through the critical gauntlet, its time to think about how best to convey that argument to an audience. Too often, students forget that the main purpose of writing the senior thesis is to communicate ideas to the world. In communicating your argument successfully, you must frame it and present it in terms that your reader can understand. In researching and writing the rough draft, you began by developing a provisional structure for your ideas. Now that youve laid out your ideas according to this provisional arrangement, your job is to critique that structure and to figure out ways to make it stronger. The structure of your thesis helps you to make your thesis argument more precise, more clear, and more persuasive. So, in conversation with your tutor, you should discuss the best ways to order your thoughts and evidence so that you can present them in a logical, coherent, and convincing way. Remember that there is never only one way to communicate an idea to an audience. Think again about how many chapters you want your thesis to contain and what the precise argument of each of those chapters should be. In thinking again about chapters, never forget that your job is to narrate. A very common mistake is to assume that readers know far more than they actually do about the subject of the thesis. The result is that students neglect to tell the whole story student neglect, that is, to explain to readers the basics of what they need to know. Dont ever forget that you have a story to tell with your thesis, and that all theses, like traditional stories, must contain a beginning, middle, and end. Most students spend all of their time on the middle parts of their stories, which is where the analysis is, but then overlook entirely the beginning and end. Dont ever assume that your reader already knows the beginning and end of the story that you want to tell. Here again is where picturing a friendly, but non-expert close friend as your conversant can be incredibly useful. The more you have that person firmly in mind as you write to him or her, the more likely you will be able to narrate your story precisely, clearly, and convincingly. And if youre worried about providing too much common knowledge, ask your tutor for specific advice.
Are you working with a complete rough draft that contains all four prescribed elements? If not, you are doing yourself a disservice by continuing onward. If youre not sure, talk to your tutor immediately and devise a good plan for proceeding.
Critiquing Evidence
The last element of revising, as you hone your thesis statement and find the best structure for your ideas, involves thinking about how well your evidence supports your argument. This is sometimes very difficult to do alone, so regular discussion with your tutor about evidence will be crucially important. Its another clich, but it can sometimes be helpful to envision yourself as a lawyer making a case to a jury.You must convince the jury that your particular answer to your research question is the best one out there. In conversation with your tutor, ask yourself the following questions: Does your evidence really say what you claim? Do you have enough evidence to make your claim? Have you considered all of the obvious counterarguments? The more you put your evidence to the test, the more persuasive your arguments will become, and the more successful your thesis project will be.
acknowledge indebtedness for insights or arguments taken from other writers; 2. to make minor qualifications, to prevent misunderstanding, or otherwise to clarify the text when such statements, if put in the text, would interrupt the flow; 3. to carry further some topic discussed in the text, when such discussion is needed but does not fit into the text.
Bibliography: You must append a bibliography, or list of works consulted, to your thesis. Its a good idea to compile your bibliography as you write, rather than try to put it together all at once at the end (there are very powerful bibliography programs now available, such as RefWorks and Endnote, that generate bibliographies automatically; see Appendix B for more information). The purpose of the bibliography is to be a convenience to the reader, and thus it may be descriptive, wholly or in part. Primary sources and secondary authorities should be listed under separate headings.
In considering the 20,000 word limit, remember that bigger does not equal better. The best theses tend to be tight, elegant, and to the point.
chapter five
page 30 | Chapter Five: Finishing the Job
The last stage of the senior thesis project translates into the final .2 miles of the 26.2 mile marathon route. It is the final phase of the race, when the steady stride and momentum that youve worked hard to generate and maintain propels you, once and for all, through to the end. Over the deafening noise of the crowd cheering you to the finish line, we simply want to provide you with some words about proofreading, some guidelines for printing and binding, and some final thoughts about achieving closure for your project. Congratulations! Youre almost there!
Proofreading
All of you have heard plenty of stern words from your professors and tutors about the necessities of proofreading, so we will spare you more diatribe here. We will simply assert that proofreading is, in fact, important. And well remind you that you should do your very best to leave yourself at least a full day or two at the end for it. Proofreading helps you to present your work in a good light and ensures that your thesis will make a good first impression on your readers. Turning in a thesis that you have not proofread is the equivalent of showing up to an important job interview with unwashed hair, ratty clothes, and flip-flops. It does not leave a good first impression. The goal of proofreading is to make certain that your readers can concentrate fully on your ideas. You do not want to allow them to be distracted by anything else. Even the most brilliant ideas can become obscured by typos, incorrect citation styles, and bad grammar. If you can, try to enlist (pay) a friend to proofread your work for you. You should proofread your work, too, but you are probably too close to your words to see them with 100% clarity. Ideally, another pair of eyes will help you to seek out and destroy all of the annoying and pesky little errors.
two copies to History and Literature and one copy to the other concentration, all on or before the History and Literature deadline.You should also give a copy to your tutor, on regular white paper. Costs for paper, printing, and binding can run $50 or more, so be sure to budget in advance for it. Finally, be sure to take note of the following special information.
Title Page: All theses must include a title page that accords with Harvards required format (see Appendix C for a sample title page). Word Count Page: Immediately following the title page, you must insert a separate page indicating the word count for your thesis (see Appendix C for a sample word count page). This figure refers only to the text; it does not include footnotes, documents, bibliography, or appendices. Table of Contents: Every thesis requires a Table of Contents to guide the reader. Body Format: Margins should be 1 1/2 on the left, 1 on the right), and pages should be numbered, beginning with the first page of the introduction. Left justify only; do not full justify. The lines of type must be double-spaced, except for quotations of five lines or more, which should be indented 2 from the left and single-spaced. Font size for the body text of the thesis should be 12pt. Footnotes must be 10, 11, or 12pt. in the same font as the body text. Times New Roman font is strongly recommended. Acknowledgments: Please do not include acknowledgments in the hard copies that you initially submit. Outside readers prefer not to know who directed your thesis, lest they be somehow swayed by that knowledge. If you wish, you may add acknowledgments after your thesis has been read.
appendix a
page 32 | Appendix A: Funding Your Research
In the spring of your junior year, you will receive information about funding your senior thesis research. You certainly do not need to do summer research in order to write a successful thesis. (Some of our best theses have been started in September.) However, some students find it helpful to begin their research over the summer, often in conjunction with other jobs or internships. You may be thinking that junior year is too early to apply for a thesis grant since you have not decided on a thesis topic. This is normal. For the purpose of your grant applications, you want to be as specific as possible about the primary materials with which you think you would like to work and the questions that you think you would like to answer. Grant committees understand that your topic will naturally evolve between the time that you submit your grant proposal and the time when you actually carry out your research. So even if you do not know the exact topic that you wish to study, you can at least work with your tutor in the beginning of the junior spring term on devising the general subject for your thesis research, on narrowing down possible source bases, and on identifying library collections that you could use in your research. This will be a useful exercise for you whether you receive a grant or not. Note that deadlines tend to be EARLY in the spring semester (for many, February and March). You should contact the relevant program to double-check deadline dates and to inquire about specific application procedures. When it comes time to write your application, the best person to advise you is your Hist and Lit tutor, since he or she will be most familiar with the project you are formulating.You may also find copies of An Introduction to Grantsmanship (from The Harvard College Guide to Grants, 12th Edition, by Paul Bohlmann and Adonica Lui) in the main office, which contains helpful advice on grant applications. If you have further questions about funding, make an appointment with the Assistant Director of Studies. The fellowships tutor in your house can be an additional source of support. Finally, OCS offers various workshops in February on writing proposals and devising budgets that could be helpful to you; be sure to check the event calendar on the OCS website.
Harvard College Research Program for summer undergraduate research in any field; includes the possibility of a stipend or work-study award (also offered for fall and spring term). Mark DeWolfe Howe Fund Grants for summer or term-time research in U.S. civil rights or civil liberties or in the Anglo-American legal tradition. Institute of Politics Summer Thesis Research Awards for summer thesis research on American government, politics, or public policy; travel restricted to the United States. Office of International Programs Scholarships for Summer Study Abroad Programs offer support for Harvard Summer School study-abroad programs or Harvard-approved summer study abroad. John Patterson Traveling Fellowship for summer research, study, travel, or work in Italy. Carol K. Pforzheimer Student Fellowships for research based in the special resources of the Radcliffe College Archives and the Schlesinger Library. Real Colegio Complutense Summer Field Research Grants for short research visits to Spain for topics focusing on Spain. David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies Summer Travel Grants for senior thesis research in Latin America, the Caribbean, or other appropriate research sites. South Asia Initiative Undergraduate Tata Study Grants for funded research and internships in India. Ukrainian Research Institute Summer Travel Grants for research projects in Ukraine. University Committee on Human Rights Studies Undergraduate Research Awards for undergraduate summer research projects in human rights anywhere in the world. Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History Senior Thesis Research Grant for summer research fellowships for senior thesis research on any topic in American history. Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Undergraduate Summer Travel Grants fund travel for senior thesis research in international affairs, including transnational, comparative, and foreign country study.
appendix b
IBZ: Internationale Bibliographie der geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Zeitschriftenliteratur. An international and interdisciplinary bibliography of academic periodical literature focusing on the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts. It contains over 2,550,000 journal articles from about 10,785 journals. International Index to Black Periodicals. The International Index to Black Periodicals (IIBP) includes current and retrospective bibliographic citations and abstracts from over 150 scholarly and popular journals, newspapers, and newsletters from the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. Many recent articles link to full text. HAPI, Hispanic American Periodicals Index. The Hispanic American Periodicals Index contains citations to articles in more than 400 scholarly journals published in Latin America or treating Latin American and U.S. Hispanic topics. Dates of coverage: 1970 to present. Handbook of Latin American Studies. The Handbook of Latin American Studies contains records describing books, book chapters, articles, and conference papers published in the field of Latin American studies. Coverage includes relevant books as well as over 800 social science and 550 humanities journals and volumes of conference papers from 1990 to the present. Periodicals Index Online. An index to the contents of thousands of journals in the humanities and social sciences, from their first issues to 1990/1991. The journals are primarily American and British, but include many European language publications. Nineteenth Century Masterfile (Pooles Index). Primarily useful as an online version of Pooles Index, the major contemporary index to American, and to some extent, British periodical literature from 1802-1906. Also provides access to a variety of other indexes to journal articles, newspapers, and government documents. American Periodical Series 1740-1900. Indexes and links to digitized page images of American magazines and journals that originated between 1741, when Andrew Bradfords American Magazine and Benjamin Franklins General Magazine were launched, and 1900. The bulk of the collection dates from the 19th-century; periodicals that began publication before 1900 and continued into the 20th century are included through 1940. Academic Search Premier (Ebsco). A general-purpose index to both popular and academic articles, the majority of which are full text. Particularly useful for book and film reviews. FIAF International Film Archive Database (1972-). The main database, the International Index to Film Periodicals, contains over 230,000 article references from more than 300 academic and popular film journals from 1972 to the present. Film Index International. Lists about 100,000 films from 170 countries with cast and production information. Also offers references to periodical articles about each film, many of which are not included in FIAF, and biographical data for 40,000 film industry figures.
Helpful Websites
Harvard Expository Writing Program Student Writing Guides: a range of writing guides designed to provide students with practical advice, often for specific types of writing. http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k24101&pageid=icb. page123040. Harvard Writing Centers Writing Resources: a series of helpful guides for writing basics. http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~wricntr/resources.html.
Notetaking and Writing Freeware (keyword search the web for download information)
Dark Room: Most History and Literature students are too young to remember, but computers in the 1980s came with monitors that simply had a black screen with green machine font.This program replicates that for you.Why would you ever want that? Well, its good if youre nostalgic, but this program is really useful if you like a writing environment with no distractions. If you want a program that will block out everything but you and your words, this tiny program is for you. Evernote: An excellent notetaking program with a slightly bloated interface. Its best function, by far, is its webclipping feature. Also has a useful to do list and calendar component. Keynote 1.6.5: This is an open-source tabbed notepad program (based on Windows Rich Text Editor) that allows you to take notes in three dimensions. Use the program to organize individual notes within nodes, folders, and trees of information. Great for organizing and arranging all of those little bits of information all in one place. Terrific for outlining.
Total Text Container: This powerful and relatively user friendly Personal Information Manager allows you to store virtually everything (from the publishers description:notes, passwords, images, bookmarks, contacts, spreadsheet, calendar events & tasks, import/ export Google iCal files) in one place. Its a good choice if you want to keep every single part of your thesis work (and life) inside a single program.
Bibliography Software
Endnote: This is a powerful bibliography program that allows you to keep all of your bibliography information in a single Endnote library and link it to your word processing document. Its not 100% user friendly, especially for humanities projects (the program was originally designed for the sciences). But youll love it when you click a button and this program generates perfectly formatted footnotes AND a perfectly formatted bibliography. An amazingly helpful tool for researchers. RefWorks: RefWorks is not quite as powerful as Endnote, but it does largely the same kind of work for you, its free, and its more fully integrated with the Harvard system. For more information, see http://hcl.harvard.edu/research/guides/refworks/.
Backup Tools
Gmail Space: This is an indispensible extension for Mozilla Firefox that allows you to link your browser to a Gmail account and use its space for backing up files. Create a dedicated Gmail account, click on the Gmail Space icon in Firefox, input your dedicated accounts name and password, and transfer files. Use nightly for file backups and never lose your work again.
Further Reading
Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The Craft of Research, 3rd Ed. University of Chicago Press, 2008. A detailed guide to an extended research project, from start to finish. Directed more toward professional researchers, this book can also be helpful to thesis writers, especially for its suggestions about developing ideas and breaking research down into manageable parts. Gibaldi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Sixth Edition. Modern Language Association of America, 2003. An essential handbook for thesis writers in literature fields, use this handbook for MLA style. Silvia, Paul J. How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. American Psychological Association, 2007. A good guide to the psychology of easy writing. If youre someone who often has trouble putting words to the page, this encouraging little book can help to free your mind. Strunk, William and E.B. White. The Elements of Style. Allyn & Bacon, 1999. This is a classic on the art of writing precisely, clearly, and persuasively. Its short, to the point, and cheap to buy in any bookstore. It features a brief grammar manual and a superb essay on style written by the great twentieth-century American writer, E.B. White (author of Charlottes Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, One Mans Meat, etc.). Turabian, Kate L. et al. A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, Seventh Edition: Chicago Style for Students and Researchers. University of Chicago Press, 2007. An essential handbook for thesis writers in history, use this handbook for University of Chicago style.
Sample Documents
For your convenience, we have included a sample title page, sample word count page, some sample grant proposals, and some sample thesis proposals (without bibliographies).
appendix c
page 40 | Appendix C: Sample Documents
Please note that the title page and word count page accord with university guidelines that all students must follow. The grant and thesis proposals are provided as examples only. They are not meant to be prescriptive in any way.
Presented to the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors
Harvard College Research Program Research Proposal Anglo-American Modernism has long intrigued me. My interest was first piqued in high school, where I read T.S. Eliots poetry in class and Virginia Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway at home, and then cemented during my first semester at Harvard in my Expository Writing course on Woolf and Hemingway. Largely because of my interest in these figures, I became a History and Literature concentrator in the Britain and America field at the end of my freshman year. Since then, I have encountered Woolf in English 10b (Major British Writers II) and written a sophomore essay for History and Literature entitled For all the world to read:Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf s Orlando. This year, I have expanded my study beyond Woolf with a junior tutorial focused on British fiction in the Modernist and pre-Modernist periods. In addition to various articles, I have read such authors as James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ford Madox Ford, and Henry James. My tutorial has emphasized British writers because my tutor, Michele Martinez, specializes in British literature. However, because my field is Britain and America, I have also engaged American Modernists outside of tutorial. For example, in History 1666, The World of William James, I have written one essay on the links between Gertrude Steins aesthetic and Jamess description of consciousness, and I am writing a long research paper on the same subject and its implications for the interest of both Stein and James in painting. I have also sought to understand the place of Modernism in the history of literature by constructing a schedule of courses this spring that brackets my tutorial in British Modernism on one side with The World of William James and on the other with English 169, The Road to Postmodernism. This longstanding interest in Modernism has culminated this year in my junior paper for History and Literature, entitled Swagger Sex: The Politics of the Female Body and Reproduction in Wyndham Lewiss Tarr. In this essay, I explore the character of Anastasya Vasek in Lewiss 1918 novel, focusing primarily on her control of her own sexuality, body, and reproduction and the threat that such autonomy presents for the title character, Frederick Tarr. Tarr remains caught between Anastasya and another sort of woman represented by Bertha Lunken and Rose Fawcett, whose children pin him down into forced, boring relationships. I examine the ways in which Lewiss biography to some extent lies beneath the development of these characters and Tarrs dilemma, trace the additions and revisions that Lewis made to Tarr over time, and turn finally to a discussion of Lewiss attitude towards contraceptives, which he presents as an aid to feminists in later writings. Ultimately, readers of Lewis might well view contraceptives as an aid to philandering male artists like Lewis and Tarr and as a partial solution to Tarrs dilemma. For my senior thesis in History and Literature next year, I am planning an expansion of my junior paper, and it is for this project that I am applying for funding from the Harvard College Research Program. I will extend my examination of body politics to other works by Wyndham Lewis, particularly his 1937 novel The Revenge for Love. I also hope to undertake a comparison between the body politics of Lewiss work and life and
the body politics of another Modernist. Gertrude Stein seems the most likely candidate for this comparison. Both she and Lewis spent many years in Paris in communities of artistic expatriates, and both possessed a passionate interest in visual art; Lewis was a leading avantgarde painter as well as a writer, and Stein was an important collector and critic of art and a friend to artists such as Matisse and Picasso. Lewis and Stein even met once, in 1913 in Paris, and wrote about each other with marked vehemence. Indeed, Steins American- and woman-centered life and work serve as an excellent contrast to Lewiss marked British masculinity. In my thesis, I would examine these connections and contrasts and focus on the body politics of both artists, particularly in relation to the representation of the female body and reproduction in their work. I would also investigate the responses of Lewis and Stein to the changing patterns of reproduction in the inter-war period, when fertility rates fell sharply and birth control became a political issue in Britain and United States for the first time. In this project, I hope to be advised by Michele Martinez, a member of the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature and the Department of English and American Literature and Language. She has worked with me this year as my junior tutor, and her familiarity with feminist and other theories about the female body and the work of Wynham Lewis certainly qualify her to advise my thesis. However, because she specializes in British literature, any extension of my project to include Gertrude Stein would require me to seek some outside advice from a scholar of American literature. I plan to undertake the research for my thesis during the summer at the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, my home city. Since I must remain at Harvard for three weeks to fulfill my commitment to the Harvard University Student Porter Program, I will not be able to begin my research until July. Once I begin, however, I plan to research my thesis in lieu of finding employment, and I have applied for a stipend to support my work. I will spend the months of July and August at Emory, using their collections to read texts by Lewis and Stein and to research the cultural conceptions of the female body and reproduction that surrounded them and the ways in which these notions were changing at the time. At the end of the summer, I plan to travel for two or three days to the Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell University and examine the papers of Wyndham Lewis in the Rare and Manuscripts Collections there. As a less frequently studied Modernist, his letters have not drawn the attention that Steins papers have, and they are less readily available in collected form. In order to support this project, I have applied for a stipend because research for my thesis will take the place of a job during July and August. I have also requested reimbursement for the expenses I will incur at the Woodruff Library, where I will be unable to take books out of the library and will need to photocopy all source material. Finally, I have requested reimbursement for transportation, lodging, and food during my brief trip to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York at the end of August.
Thesis Research Proposal for Anti-Colonial Protest in Literature: Moroccan Theatre in the French Protectorate Most scholars agree that Napoleons invasion of Egypt in 1798 catalyzed modernization in the Arab world through contact with the West. During a decline that had lasted several centuries, Arab literature had also stagnated, but the arrival of the printing press from Europe along with the influence of European writers provided Egyptians with new ideas and possibilities. Soon, Arabs had appropriated and experimented with the traditionally Western literary forms of the short story, the novel, and theatre.1 While many scholars have studied the Wests influence on Egyptian, Levantine, and Iraqi literature of the 19th century, a much later Franco-Arab encounter has remained largely ignored. In 1912, Morocco was the last African country to be colonized. Although Moroccans had contact with the West before Spain and France divided their country into regions of separate European control, it is interesting to note that the first theatre in Morocco did not open until 1913. Furthermore, it seems that no Moroccan wrote Arabiclanguage drama until the early 1920s. Thereafter, two forms of theatre apparently became widely popular: plays by the French writer Molire (translated into Arabic), and anticolonial drama performed in the Moroccan dialect of Arabic.2 Within this story lays a central paradox and many questions that I hope to answer. A combination of historical and literary methods may explain the effect of European influence on Moroccan literature as well as Moroccan strategies for struggling against colonialism. How and why did Moroccans adopt (and therefore accept) a European literary form to protest European politics? Why didnt theatre exist until the 1920s and then suddenly become widely popular? Why did writers use theatre to fight French and Spanish colonialism instead of other literary forms, or how did their use of theatre differ? How did European or other Arab literature influence Moroccan writing? How did Moroccan theatre affect the anti-colonial movement and the colonial powers, if at all? While research has offered answers to similar questions for different parts of the world and other types of literature (my bibliography mentions examples of works on anticolonial poetry and drama from the Arab east, especially Egypt), little has been published that addresses this phenomenon in Morocco; moreover, the few works I have found lack a theoretical background, revealing close readings, or a synthesis of the evidence into conclusions that further our understanding of the cultural effects of political/military encounters on the one hand, and about methods of resisting colonialism on the other. Several barriers may have prevented scholars from researching this subject a thorough study requires knowledge of the languages spoken in Morocco, for instance, to ensure For an example of this widely accepted point of view, see M. M. Badawi, ed. The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. 2 Abdelwahed Ouzri. Le Thtre au Maroc: Structures et Tendances. Casablanca: Les Editions Toubkal, 1997.
1
access to primary and secondary sources (Moroccan Arabic, Standard Arabic, French, and Spanish are necessary, all of which I know). Furthermore, many of the sources including theatrical pieces that were never published and recordings of the performances, in addition to the writers, dramaturges, and actors are only available in Morocco. This summer, I hope to travel to Casablanca, Rabat, Fs, and other parts of Morocco to work with these sources. Through archival research, I will search for the texts of plays unavailable in the United States and secondary sources on those plays. In stores as well as archives, I will look for recordings of plays that were shown on TV. Finally, I will meet with Moroccans researching similar subjects (I have already found a graduate student in Fs who said he would tell me about the dissertation he is writing on Moroccan theatre if I came to see him) and interview primary sources, too. I will almost certainly be in Casablanca for an eight-week internship and will start my thesis research then since, in addition to having Casablancas resources available, I will be able to make day-trips to Rabat (the national archives are open on days I will most likely have free from work) and contact my human sources by phone. I would like to devote at least three weeks after my internship solely to thesis research, however, so that I can continue working in the archives in Rabat and elsewhere, in addition to conducting interviews in other parts of the country. After spending this spring preparing for my summer research, I will arrive in Morocco with the tools, plans, and knowledge necessary to make the most of my time there. I am already delving into preliminary research with Professor William Granara, my tutor for my one-on-one Near Eastern Languages junior tutorial and Harvards leading academic of North African literature. He will probably become my faculty adviser for my thesis and continue working with me on this topic throughout next year, but, at the moment, he is helping me explore the subject of anti-colonial poetry from the Arab east and helping me find lesser-known materials touching on this theme in the context of Moroccan theatre. Furthermore, since the research topic I have chosen is considered cutting-edge in my field, I am lucky to have found many other instructors so interested in my work that they have already offered their resources, including my History and Literature junior tutorial leader Zahr Stauffer (who is especially helpful at working through frustrating moments of long-term projects with me, as well as directing my attention to productive questions), a graduate student in Near Eastern Languages applying to work for the History and Literature department, Jonathan Smolin (he is writing his dissertation on Moroccan theatre and has already provided me with a list of useful references and information about conducting research in Morocco), and Susan Slyomovics, an anthropology professor at MIT for whom I worked freshman year and who will put me in touch with her contacts in Morocco. Thank you for considering to provide the funds necessary to make this project possible.
Name: Field in History and Literature: Early Modern Europe Tutor: Thesis Topic or Title: Issues of Gender in Travel Literature: Lady Mary Wortley Montagus Turkish Embassy Letters In 1716 Edward Wortley Montagu was appointed Ambassador to Turkey, a position which involved travel through Europe to Constantinople, the epitome of the exotic and unknown. While Edwards diplomatic negotiations took place in Sultan Ahmed IIIs palace, his wife, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu caught a glimpse of an even more forbidden world, exoticised in accounts by European travelers and fantasized about by the literate European publicthe seraglio. She kept a diary based on her experiences there, which she later transformed into a collection of letters written to family, friends, admirers, literary men, and her husband. Although she published numerous works upon her return to Englandmany of which extolled the intellectual capacities of women, disparaged their current societal position and responded to male authors chauvinismThe Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) were not published until a year after Lady Marys death. In her lifetime, the manuscript circled among a small circle of friends, the most noteworthy of whom was Mary Astell, an English proto-feminist writer who wrote the a short introduction to the Letters in 1724. In this thesis, I will examine Lady Mary Wortley Montagus Turkish Embassy Letters as an indirect critique of the condition of women in Enlightenment England. I will specifically focus on the descriptions of the women in the harem and Lady Marys relationship with them, keeping four main backdrops in mind: the genre of the epistolary novel, the oriental tale and orientalism, the epistolary correspondence between Montagu and her circle of confidants, and the pamphlets on womens conduct and position in early eighteenth-century England. Generally, I will ask: what did TEL mean to its few English readers before 1750 and what would it have meant to a wider English readership? Lady Mary works hard to debunk prevailing stereotypes about the harem and the Near East. In so doing, she makes common cause with writers of the same period (Montesquieu, Johnson,Voltaire), who both take advantage of the newfound popularity of the Oriental tale and undercut its exoticism. Of particular interest in this connection is Montesquieus Persian Letters (1721), which gives to the epistolary novel an orientalist tinge to accomplish a social critique (of France) as well. By tracing the reception of these oriental tales in England, I hope to set Lady Marys work in relation to widespread public interest in the Near East. The epistolary character of Lady Marys work necessitates an examination of the conventions of letter-writing in the period. Secondary essays will help me assess whether style was associated strongly with gender (female or male) or with a topic (travel writing or politics). A significant focus of my investigation will comprise Lady Marys circle(s) of acquaintance and the travels of her manuscript within these circles. Lady Mary was close with both Mary Astell, the champion of womens learning and critic of the institution of marriage, and Alexander Pope, the famed Catholic poet. She also participated in London Coffeehouse society (Kit-Kat Club). I will continue to trace the circles of readers of the manuscript after Lady Marys death up until the publication(s) of TEL. Finally, Lady Marys social critique in her portrait of the harem must be examined in relation to the larger debates over the proper role and position of women in English society. Primarily examined through Astells and Lady Marys publications, correspondences between Lady Mary, Astell and Pope, and secondary literature, I will characterize the proto-feminist movement of the time, evaluating its coherence, composition, tenets
and activity. As a whole, this thesis will weave together themes of gender, travel and social commentary to argue the significance of The Turkish Embassy Letters in eighteenth-century England and to capture the interplay between culture(s) and text(s).
Staying Healthy
Bureau of Study Counsel Writing Groups
From the BSC website (http://bsc.harvard.edu/index.html):
appendix d
The Bureau of Study Counsel is a resource center for students academic and personal development. The Bureau encourages the development of the whole person in the interrelated realms of intellectual, emotional, and interpersonal life. Students consult the Bureau with a wide variety of academic and personal concerns, and the Bureau staff welcomes any topic for discussion. Services include:
academic and personal counseling groups and workshops Harvard Course in Reading and Study Strategies peer tutoring (course-based or English as a Second Language) supervision of peer counseling and peer education groups consultation and outreach referral to other services or providers, either within or outside the Harvard community
The undergraduate and graduate student years are times of intense growth and development intellectually, emotionally, and interpersonally. During these years, students will form an adult identity, develop their capacities for critical and creative thinking, and explore such aspects of their lives as relationships, sexuality, health choices, and career direction. While being a student can be stimulating, it can also be stressful. Students may encounter academic, emotional, and relationship difficulties that test the limits of their current coping strategies.The Bureau can help students claim their existing strengths and develop new ones in their efforts to live a life that feels true to the whole of who they are. At the Bureau, students can expect to find responsive people counselors, mentors, advisors, facilitators, and other students who can help them feel less alone with their experience and better able to face the academic and personal challenges of being a Harvard student. The Bureau is here to help students enhance their engagement in their learning, improve their scholastic performance, trust their emotions, enjoy their relationships, and deepen their connection to their sense of self and to what really matters to them in life.
UHS Resources
From the UHS Mental Health Services website (http://huhs.harvard.edu/OurServices/CounselingMentalHealthSupport.aspx): Counseling and mental health staff are available to assist with a variety of concerns, including academic issues, relationship conflicts, problems with alcohol use, unwanted sexual contact, and depression or anxiety. Our staff consists of both male and female professionals who are trained and experienced in dealing with issues specific to
university students. Many have special interests in areas such as eating concerns, academic concerns, relationship issues, alcohol and other drugs, and chronic illnesses. We encourage you to schedule an appointment with one of our staff members to discuss personal concerns and to develop new ways of resolving issues. Available services include individual, couple, family, or group meetings, depending on your needs. A variety of counseling and support groups specifically designed for students are offered each year.
appendix e
2008
Alexander Chase-Levenson, A Gate for the Whole Continent: Quarantine, Illness, and the Imaginative Geography of British Travel to the East, 1780-1850 Frederic Clark, Historiae Veritas and the First Historiographer: Reading Dares Phrygius in The Middle Ages Ofole Mgbako, My Blackness is the Beauty of this Land: African-American Culture and the Creation of the Black World in South Africas Black Consciousness Movement (1969-1978) Nathaniel Naddaff-Hafrey, In Search of The City of All Faiths: Post-9/11 Cultural Exchange, Hybrid Heroism, and Historical Reclamaion in The Zein Series and The 99 Danielle Sassoon, Constructing Jewish Identity: Ludwig Lewisohns Evolving Spiritual Nationalism Erika Solomon, History for the Future: The Challenge of Bridging Israeli and Palestinian Narratives in the PRIME Shared History Project
2007
Matthew Growdon, Ford Madox Ford and the Wartime Mind Michael Grynbaum, A Joke by Any Other Name, Hoax as a Social Protest: Three Case Studies Rachel Nolan, Wrap Th Green Flag Round Me: Irish Republican Rhetoric in Sean OCaseys Kathleen Listens In William Payne, American Weimar: German Writers and Transcendentalist Self-Identity Katherine Takvorian, The Sex Factor: Abolitionist Outsiders, Amalgamation, and the Search for Social Equality in America, 18251843 Thomas Wickman, The Free Dollar: Money and the Imagination of Freedom in Antebellum Fugitive Slave Autobiographies
2006
Heather Brink-Roby, Naturally Ordered in Sheaves: George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Taxonomy Jenny Davis, Peter Kalifornsky: Working DenaIna Country With Words Christine DeLucia, King Philips War in Landscape and Memory Micah Fitzerman-Blue, Individualized Justice and Federalism: Uncle-Niece Marriages for Jews in Rhode Island Kyle Frisina, From Montgomery to Meridian: Representations of Space and Place in the Civil Rights Movement Sylvia Houghteling, Silk Culture: Visions of American Labor 18801893 Cara Lewis, Blasting Bohemia: A Revaluation of Wyndham Lewiss Tarr Iliana Montauk, Moliere for Morocco: Postcolonial Negotiations of French Theater Policy (19501994) David Wax, Dismantling the Archive: Counter-history in Augusto Roa Bastoss Yo el Supremo
2005
Brian Distelberg, The Making of a Gay Classic: A Cultural History of Auntie Mame Katherine ONeill, Making The Richtersveld People: Legal Personality in South African Land Reform, 19982004 Claire Pasternack, Itineraries of Modern Life at the Paris Exposition of 1900 T. Josiah Pertz, The Jewgrass Boys: Bluegrass Musics Emergence in New York Citys Washington Square Park, 19461961 Chloe Schama, Sensation in the Court: The Narration of Feminine Virtue in 1861 Yelverton Bigamy Trial and its Aftermath Stephanie Safdi, How They Wrote America: Anzia Yezierska and the Discourse of Pluralism Laura Schubert, Liberty, Equality, Anxiety: Identity and Displacement in Post-Revolutionary France, 18151840
2004
Shannon Ringvelski, Buy the truth, and sell it not: The Economic Antichrist in Two Early Modern Contexts Catherine Romatowski, Outlining the Playing Field: Title IX, Athletic Bodies and Categories of Sex/ Gender in the 1990s Katherine Stirling, The Last Utopia: Aesthetics and Ideology at the 1937 Paris Exposition Madiha Sattar, Re-Placing the British?: Post-Colonial Elites and Permeable Spaces in Rushdies South Asia
2003
John Bash, The Epic Canon: Satans Guns in Paradise Lost Catherine Buchanan, Pointed Panegyric: The Changing Form and Mixed Message of the Caroline Masque Jonathan Darman Killing,Society: Cold War Hollywoods American Upper Class Nicholas Horbaczewski, The Bitter School of Honor and Faith: Forging a New Manhood in the Crucible of Combat Hayang Kim, Imagining the Nation: Kathe Kollwitz and Artistic Representation in Wilhelmine Germany, 18951910 Beatrice Kitzinger, The Forms of Things Unknown: Fourteenth Century Visual Art and the Viewers Ascent to Heaven Ana-Maria Lopez, Armed Only with Paintbrushes: The Debates over Art and Modernism in Diego Riveras Rockefeller Center Mural Sue Meng, Mapping Daniel Deronda Charisse Padilla, Latinidads Limits: The Shortcomings of a Community-Based Vision of Latino Identity in Junot Diazs Drown Jonathan Sherman, Were Gonna Be Ready Tonight: Civil Rights and the Race Politics of Postwar Film Noir Matthew Sussman, Doing Justice: In Defense of W.H. Audens Later Poetry Miranda Richmond, Inkblots and Bloodstains: The Development of Jacobin Ideology in Rural France Anna Weiss, (Re)Reading Turgenevs Rudin: Text and Context in 1850s Russia
2002
Tobias Berkman, Dressing Up America: The Jewish Chameleon in Americas Popular Imagination Marijeta Bozovic, The Exiled Reflection: Mirrors in Joseph Brodskys Poetic Ouvre Angus Burgin, Among All These Forces: Fictions of a Changing Academy Alexander Clark, Enigmatique par le Fond et sans Vrit dans le Dtail: How the Closet Came to Be Before the Homosexual in Three Mal du Sicle Fictions Trevor Cox, Edward Bates, the Civil War, and the Legal Mind of the Lincoln Administration Dehn Gilmore, It Is We Who Gnaw Like the Worm: Thomas Hardys Novels and Victorian Debates About Artistic Permanence Melissa Gniadek, Divisions of a Separating World: Community in the Composite Novel Jewetts The Country of the Pointed Firs, Andersons Winesburg, Ohio, and Steinbecks The Pastures of Heaven Catherine Gowl, Complacency, Security, and Pain: James Agee and Walker Evans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in the 1940s and 1960s
Vera Keller, Quintessential Machines: Two Seventeenth Century Machines in a Changing World Culture Benjamin Kornell, The American Ambulance Experience and World War I Literature Susan Long, Foolish Fighting: Dueling, Power and License in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Andrew Lynn Reading Bartelby Megan Anderson, McPhie Negotiationg Ideologies: Anti-Shaker Literature, 17801820 Jayne Rosefield, What Passing Bells?: Memorializing Benjamin Brittens War Requiem Daniel Rosenthal, Walt Whitmans War Abby Schlatter, Choked by the Weeds of Domesticity: Inserting Edith Summers Kelly into American Feminist Thought Avi Steinberg, The Heroism of Laughter and the Community of Laughers: The Wabbit and World War I Amewica Kristen Sueoka, Survival of the Fittest Shall Mean the Triumph of the Good, the Beautiful, the True: The Racial Millenium in A History of the American People, Souls of Black Folk, and The Birth of a Nation Laura Wells, Focusing on the Periphery: Anglo-Scottish Border Identity, 13141513 Christopher Cox, Declining German America: German-Language Humor Writing and the Dissapearance of an Ethnic Group Ross Douthat, The Subversive Reactionary: Rider Haggards Unimperial Fiction Alexis Loeb, Trial and Erreur: The Cases of Robert Brasillach and Ezra Pound in Their National Contexts
2001
Lauren Brandt, Nursing the Nation: Civil War Women and the Reconstruction of Self, Work and America Chad Denton, ffenlichkeit and the Rhine Crisis 1840: A Study of the Reception of Nicolas Beckers Rheinland Jacqueline Newmyer, The Politics of Truth: Simone Weils Theory of Education and Law Joanna Peltason, The Role of Race and Black Character in Eudora Weltys Fiction, from 1936 1972 Jessica Richman, Moving South: Northern Jewish Women in the Civil Rights Movement David Shapiro, Stranger Than Fiction: Invented Narrative in Russian Literary Criticism, 1858 1871 Blythe Yee Dryden, Imperialism, and Generic Experiment Rebeca Gogel, Mongrel Graffiti: Intertextuality and the Redemption of History in Michael Ondaatjies In the Skin of the Lion and The English Patient Eleanor Hubbard, Radical Pirates: Political Thought on the Margins of Society
H&
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Committee on Degrees in History and Literature Faculty of Arts and Sciences Harvard University